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  • Bush Vetoes… Anti-Torture Legislation? (Joe)

    President Bush vetoed Saturday legislation meant to ban the CIA from
    using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, saying it
    "would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror."

    "It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to
    ban torture," said Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. Washington Post.

    "This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good," one
    of its sponsors, Senator Diane Feinstein of California, said in a
    statement on Friday evening when it became clear Mr. Bush intended to
    carry out his veto threat. "Yet, he chose instead to leave the door
    open to use torture in the future. The United States is not well-served
    by this." New York Times.

    This could have interesting consequences as it pertains to election politics.  The Iraq War hasn’t been at the front of the nomination campaigns–the economy has.  And yet, the Republican nomination of Senator McCain, who is not interested in the economy and does not know anything about economic issues, is likely to help push the debate back to how we can most effectively kill Muslims.  McCain’s opposition to this bill, the support for it from Senators Obama and Clinton, and the fact that torture is still shocking enough to make ordinary people have opinions about it–the confluence of these factors should help to shift the debate.

    The coverage of President Bush’s veto is also interesting.  I don’t know what the law was actually going to be, but it seems safe to say that it was going to expressly ban waterboarding.  Was it also going to announce a rule that the CIA is bound by the Army Field Manual?  In any event, if you read the New York Times and Washington Post articles and the quotations from the President and prominent Republicans and Democrats contained therein, you would be justified in thinking that the debate must be over the efficacy and moral cost of torture, which currently is or may be done lawfully.

    No mention of the fact that torture–and waterboarding, regardless of whether it rises to the level of "torture"–is already unlawful.  That strikes me as an odd thing to leave out of the discussion.

    This is really just bizarre.  President Bush is falsely claiming that waterboarding and/or other sorts of physically cruel and coercive interrogation are effective weapons against Islamic terrorism, Dr. Dean is falsely implying that torture is somehow not already banned, and Senator Feinstein is falsely implying that there is currently a debate over the legal status of torture.  And our nation’s two best mainstream newspapers are going along for the ride without correcting these serious misstatements.

  • Herbie’s Big Win (Andrew)

    I’ve blogged here before about the importance of jazz artists expanding the repertoire to avoid putting out the umpteenth version of a tune from the canon of jazz standards.  As great as those songs are, they’ve been played so well, so many times, that it’s hard for a contemporary musician to outdo past recordings.

    Herbie_wins That’s why I was so happy that Herbie Hancock hatched his project of jazz interpretations of the music of Joni Mitchell.  Featuring legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the album includes guest vocals from Norah Jones, Corrinne Bailey Rae, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Luciana Souza, and Mitchell herself.  And in a real surprise, the album became the first jazz album since Getz/Gilberto in 1964 to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.  Sorry Kanye and Vince Gill!  Even though a Grammy has about as much artistic credibility as the Award for Outstanding Achivement in the Field of Excellence that Monty Burns gave Homer Simpson, it definitely gives the album a huge amount of exposure and open-minded listens from people far beyond the Downbeat crowd.

    And the album deserves it.  While more accurately described as a pop record with jazz touches, in that the vocalists anchor tunes, and the instrumentalists don’t push the formal boundaries of Mitchell’s songs, the performances are lush and elegant.  The vocalists, Turner in particular, show us once again how thoughtful a lyricist Mitchell is: a hip, acerbic channeler of her disaffection into lines at once sensitive, tough, and revealing.  And both Hancock and Shorter remind us that they’re not above pop music (Hancock’s "Rockit" was an early rap hit, back when the music was still called "rap"; you hear Shorter’s saxophone on Don Henley’s "The End of the Innocence" and Steely Dan’s "Aja"). 

    The one major limitation is that the music doesn’t push past what you might call the "Starbucks barrier" — all of the tunes are slow or mid-tempo, and don’t express anything surprising or jarring enough to make you look up from your venti latte.  And I don’t mean that as a killer diss — I generally like the music at Starbucks — it’s merely to say that part of the appeal to Grammy voters is that it’s not too challenging.  Caveat made, Hancock and Co. deserve hearty congratulations for eluding the smooth jazz pitfall while simultaneously bringing pop material into the jazz big tent so sorely in need of expansion.

  • Is Privacy Dead? (Andrew)

    Popular Science has a great piece this month from a reporter named Catherine Price who tried to be anonymous for a week.  She took out 7 days worth of cash, tried to anonymize her web-surfing, didn’t use her credit cards or her cell phone, wore a visor and dark glasses in public, instructed her bank and phone company not to sell her personal info, avoided government buildings and the E-Z pass lane to avoid surveillance cameras, and a whole host of other measures.  And she discovered that it was nearly impossible to be truly anonymous nevertheless.

    Logan_6 One of her sources claims that in a few years, it will be actually impossible to be anonymous, because tiny tracking devices called RFID chips will have become so prevalent and seemingly innocuous.  Apparently, I already have one in my passport, since I just had a new one made last year, and a company called VeriChip has already experimentally implanted them in 500 people, and has proposed replacing the "dog tags" of U.S. soldiers with the devices!  Logan’s Run, anyone? (N.B. The government-implanted red device in the hand is from this brilliant cult sci-fi movie, and is not actually an RFID).

    At the close of the article, Price connects the difficulty of maintaining privacy with the increased sophistication of data mining.  Not only is it hard not to turn your personal info to databases, you have almost no control over what banks, universities, corporations, or the government do with it once they get — or if they fail to protect it. 

    I find this type of thing deeply invasive and sinister — but there is a certain school of thought that says, "who cares about privacy, it’s a bourgeois Thoreauvian myth — and if data mining keeps me safe from terrorists and makes things run more smoothly at the mall, I’m all for it."  Where do you guys fall on the privacy spectrum?

  • Fake Memories (Sujatha)

    There seems to be a sudden rash of fake memoirs unmasked this last week. Notably, a Holocaust memoir by Misha Defonseca. She apologizes to her readers thus:

    Now, 11 years after publishing her memoir and almost two decades since she went public with her story, Defonseca has admitted that she is actually Monique De Wael, the orphaned daughter of two Catholic members of the Belgian resistance. Yesterday, through her lawyer, she released a statement to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir. The story of Misha, she said, "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving."

    Today brings the news of ‘Love and Consequences’, a memoir published just last week, being withdrawn from the market by the publishers, on the discovery that it was faked.

    In Love and Consequences, a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

    The problem is that none of it is true.

    Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

    What makes the faking of memories so egregiously awful? Why couldn’t these authors have simply presented their tales, compelling as they are, in a fictional wrapper, as Laura Ingalls Wilder chose to do?

    Wilder first began to write about her life when she was 63, in a memoir (“Pioneer Girl”), and dealt from the beginning with the difficulties of memory – she wrote her daughter that “her recollections were often vague, receding, and sometimes nonexistent” (Miller 5). That initial memoir, which did not find a publisher, provided the material for Wilder’s first book, Little House in the Big Woods, published in 1932.  This book was a best-seller, generating interest in continuing the story of pioneer life.  Wilder ultimately wrote eight novels about her early life (including one (Farmer Boy) about Almanzo’s) over the course of 12 years.

    Could it be that the memoirs sell better than novels for reasons laid out in this blog post on FictionBitch?

    But could it possibly be that readers are in fact easier with the idea
    of a memoir because the experience in a memoir is safely identifiable
    as another’s, and not our own as a good novel can make it? That the emotion evoked by a memoir is thus easier to handle, more safely sentimental?

    Is that, in essence, the appeal of a memoir which takes the reader into the mind of the author as a person undergoing unique experiences, as opposed to a novel which might force the reader to take on the persona of the protagonist?

    Whatever be the case, I’m off to add another short chapter to my much-neglected memoirs of when I was a 3rd grader. I wouldn’t swear to its complete veracity in a court of law, but maybe I can package it some day as a children’s book and see if it stands a chance of getting published.

  • “Rush” to Hillary

    Taking a break for lunch.  Will go back to the precinct in an hour.  A quick post to let you know why Hillary Clinton might pull it off in today’s Texas primary. The polls show that the race here is tight as a drum but a bit of right wing mischief may tilt the balance for Hillary.  Rush Limbaugh has urged Republicans to cross over and vote for her. If she wins in Texas (she is ahead in Ohio) the Democratic nomination will go on much longer and whoever emerges as the winner will be tired and bloody and the Democrats divided and bitter.  McCain, who is going to wrap it up for sure after today’s votes will be rested and ready in November to take on a weakened Democratic candidate with confidence and panache. 

    See some of the letters to the editor in today’s Houston Chronicle … this may be going on all over Texas. Sujatha, get ready!

  • Texas Electoral Two Step

    Everything in Texas is big. Also a bit dangerous …  and complicated.

    As Bill Clinton recently reminded voters here, "Texas is the only place in America where you can vote twice in the same election without going to jail."

    How does that work? Here is a primer. Texas_two_step (or if you’d rather, watch this video for a shorter version)

    Texans just have to be different. Even when it comes to picking a presidential nominee.

    Most other states have a primary or a caucus. Texas Democrats use both. The "Texas two-step" is a cute metaphor for this electoral hybrid, but it could make for a long and potentially confusing day on Tuesday. Primary polls will run for 12 hours. Then Democratic voters can return for their precinct’s caucus. Roughly two-thirds of Texas’ Democratic delegates come from the primaries, and one-third from the caucus process that night.

    The Texas caucuses normally are ignored by everyone but die-hard party activists. But this year, they could tip the delegate balance toward Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton. The process is so complicated that one candidate could win more popular votes statewide, but still end up with fewer delegates.

    So how does it work? Obama volunteer Sumita Prasad boiled it down like this: "In that precinct room, you want more of us and less of them. You don’t need to know math or formulas."

    The caucus — officially dubbed a "precinct convention" — begins at 7:15 p.m. or when the polls close, whichever is later. Caucus-goers arrive and put their names and presidential preference on the "sign-in sheet." The group first elects a chair and secretary. Those two then take a count, noting the total number of people and how many are for Obama or Clinton. Delegates then are distributed proportionally.

    For example, say 100 people show up at a given precinct on Tuesday night. If 75 of them support Clinton, and 25 support Obama, then she gets 75 percent of the delegates and he gets 25 percent. If the precinct has 20 delegates to allot, Clinton gets 15, Obama 5.

    But there is more and it is complicated. Since caucuses haven’t mattered much in the past and the rules are a bit vague, they will be hard to implement especially with the huge turnouts that are expected in this year’s primary. The final results may be called into question by the loser. They may even lead to lawsuits.

    Though the basic principles are simple, some fear that massive turnout and a tight race could create unforeseen problems at the 874 caucuses throughout Harris County.

    "They’re not well-understood, they’re not well-documented, and the rules have been followed quite loosely in the past," said April Lloyd, assistant primary director for Harris County Democratic Primary.

    If primary turnout this year is any indicator, attendance at the caucuses could be record-breaking, said Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party. More than 158,000 people participated in early voting in Harris County’s Democratic primary. Birnberg said that up to half a million people could vote by the close of polls Tuesday. The highest primary turnout in the last 20 years was 78,000 in 2004.

    "This is just completely off the charts," he said. "Where the big question mark comes is: How many people will come back for precinct conventions?"

    Usually, only 5,000 people attend caucuses throughout Harris County, Birnberg said. But up to 100,000 people could show up Tuesday night.

    Some party insiders like this Byzantine way of voting and others find it unnecessary and unuseful.

    (more…)

  • A Charge To Keep (Or A Horse to Steal?)

    Let us take a break from Democratic politics and talk a little about a man we have neglected for a while – George W. Bush; to him we owe numerous blog posts inspired by almost equal measures of terror, horror and entertainment.  Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and the author of a new book The Bush Tragedy, reports an interesting account of myth making by Bush.  No, this one does not involve Weapons of Mass Destruction, but a painting that hangs in the Oval Office.

    Keep_the_charge

  • Minority Candidates: What’s really going on?

    Sometimes the most interesting conversations between A.B. bloggers take place behind the scenes – in e-mail threads. Occasionally some of them make it to the pages of the blog as posts and at other times not. Over the weekend, I had forwarded a couple of articles in mainstream publications to my fellow authors. Dean and Anna were not buying the arguments made therein without a healthy dose of chloride of sodium.

    In Sunday’s issue of the New York Times, the peerless Maureen Dowd analyzed Hillary Clinton’s game plan – play both sides of the field and call every move by your opponent a foul! Here is a sample:

    On “Nightline” last week, Hillary once more wallowed in gender inequities, asserting that it’s harder for her to run than her opponent — a black man with an exotic name that most Americans hadn’t even heard a year ago.

    “Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field,” she said, “but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there.”

    Is that how she would deal with dictators, by playing the refs and going before the U.N. to demand: “How come you’re not asking Ahmadinejad these questions first?”

    Tangled in her own victimhood, she snipped to Cynthia McFadden that Obama had written in his book that “he’s a blank screen and people of widely different views project what they want to believe onto him.” She said voters were projecting their hopes onto that blank screen even though “he just hasn’t been around long enough.”

    In the next breath, asked about the women who feel sorry for her, she said: “I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It’s hard. It’s hard being a woman out there.”

    So projection is bad with Obama but good with her?

    I found much truth in Dowd’s acerbic observations. But Dean had this to say:

    Ms. Dowd seems more than a little confused, as I read this. If cerebral arguments would be refreshing, then why has she stooped to, e.g., sartorial ones? She coyly pretends she can’t discern the message of the Clinton ad, and instead takes jabs at clothing and accessories, her glasses, her pantsuit. Clearly, the ad is exploitative in a cheesy, melodramatic way, and Clinton is pretty clearly desperate at this stage, but Dowd is not inclined to say as much. Instead, she wants to psychoanalyze Clinton and her hysterical male strategists.

    The job announcement for prexy is being drafted as the candidates are being interviewed. Granted, this must occur to some extent, because the circumstances of the day will throw certain needs into relief. But Dowd assumes we all know exactly what’s required from the next President, even while she doesn’t directly broach that topic, content to belittle the whining of Clinton’s boys.

    Here’s how I see this election. It’s very similar to how I often view the bench of the Supreme Court: a bunch of doddering old purely self-interested (albeit lazy) wealthy white men. Same goes for this slate. The prospects of Clinton as the first woman president and Obama as the first African American president, in other words, are mostly irrelevant. I wish Dowd, the NYT, and the rest of big media would assume a similar default position and execute their portrayals from that standpoint.

    Then there was this article in the NYT regarding Obama’s relationship with Jewish American voters.  Colbert King has more of the same in the Washington Post – specifically on the Clinton campaign’s attempts to paint Obama as anti-Semitic and anti Israel.

    (more…)

  • Pill or Placebo? (Sujatha)

    Pills
    A recent study published in pLOS suggests that the so-called efficacy of antidepressants may be in large part due to a placebo effect, which would imply that the same level of effective treatment could be achieved by offering placebos to the mild to moderately depressed patients who currently form a huge chunk of the lucrative market for Prozac, Paxil, Effexor etc.

    (more…)

  • A New Page On The Blog

    Paint_brushFellow blogger Elatia Harris of 3 Quarks Daily recently suggested that I should display all my art work in one place on the blog. Agreeing that it is a good idea, I have created a new page for the purpose. There are not many more paintings or sketches that I plan to post beyond what has already been published. So the archiving is pretty near complete – possibly a few more additions to come. As and when I publish a new painting here, I will add it to the list.  Please see the entire Virtual Exhibition under Special Pages.

  • Virtual Exhibitions

    Regular readers have already seen my Virtual Exhibitions. New readers can now access them in one place, rather than root around in the archives.  The paintings and the posts are listed chronologically as they appeared on the blog.  You can link to the original posts through the titles to read more about the paintings. Click on the thumbnail images for enlargement.

    Rp_black_sea_2 Rp_tennis_4

    Rp_piano_2 

    Rp_3_women

                                                    

    Rp_street_3 Rp_2_women_3                          Rp_cowboy                          Rp_lighthouse                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Rp_water_carriers  Rp_mist_2                               

    Rp_umbrellas   

    Rp_gypsy       Anandpur_sahib_2_3               

    Rp_unaboober

    Churchill_50

    <

    Rp_parrots

    Rp_nebraska RP serenity RP self 2 RP minstrel

  • Canine Options

    "Need a friend? Get a dog." 

    This morning a newspaper article and a friend’s pictorial email got me thinking of dogs.  The companionship of animals has therapeutic effects on us – easing of loneliness, lowering of blood pressure are known benefits. Those of us who spend time with animals know that very well. Nursing homes and hospitals are increasingly using dogs and cats for the palliative effects of their presence on the health of their residents and patients. A new research study published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association shows that for the benefits to accrue, it doesn’t even have to be a real dog! So reports the aptly named Tim Barker in St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

    Aibo_robodog ST. LOUIS — First, horses were replaced with cars. Then carrier pigeons were put out of work by radios. Now it’s dogs who may need to look over their shoulders. They have reason to worry, according to a St. Louis University study that pitted a robotic canine against the real thing in a contest to see which was better at relieving the loneliness of nursing home residents.

    In a final analysis likely to shock dog lovers — lovers of real dogs, that is — the two creatures finished in a virtual tie.  Among the shocked dog lovers is the study’s author, Dr. William Banks, a professor of geriatric medicine at St. Louis University.

    "I kind of assumed the live dog would do better," Banks said.

    It doesn’t make it any easier knowing it was his own dog, Sparky, a 35-pound, sandy-red, floppy-eared pooch, who failed to outdo the robotic Aibo, which was made by Sony until 2006.  And it’s not like Sparky was a novice in this arena. The 9-year-old animal is a trained therapy dog. He’s been taught to make people feel good.

    "He’s a pro," Banks said. "He’s got this incredible personality."

    But it wasn’t enough to overcome a hairless robot programmed to mimic the behavior of real dogs. It barks, wags its plastic tail and learns basic commands. It can even chase a ball.

    "It’s really frightening," Banks said. "Whoever engineered the behavioral software — they must have some insight into the human psyche."

    If you don’t have time for a real dog and can’t afford a robo-dog, how about going into the backyard and creating your own? (thanks to my friend Linda for the pictures of the floral doggies )

    Dog_flower_1 Dog_flower_2 Dog_flower_3 Dog_flower_4

  • Barack Obama Is Not An American!

    Dignitaries on visits to foreign countries donning local garb is not a new thing. They do it to show respect and solidarity with their hosts. A picture of Senator Obama in traditional Somali dress was published recently and has caused a bit of a stir. Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report who first published the picture, says that the photo was circulated by the Clinton campaign. No one really knows what purpose it served. But it is widely believed that if the Clintonites are indeed the source, it may be an attempt by the Hillary camp to make Obama look suspicious (remember his Muslim name?) or at least ridiculous – something like Michael Dukakis in a tank. Hillary Clinton denied during last night’s debate that her campaign is the source of the photo. But if indeed the photo did originate there as Drudge claims it did, the words of one Hillary supporter may prove to be far worse than the deed.